Resfest

This touring festival of digital videos stops for four days, October 6-9, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door; call 312-397-4010 or visit www.resfest.com for a complete schedule.

Resfest can't be accused of neglecting its sponsors: each work lists the digital software and hardware used, letting viewers see what Canon, Apple, and Panasonic products can do. Another sponsor, Nike, actually owns the copyright to Ginga: The Soul of Brasilian Football (63 min.), which displays virtuoso footwork by six Brazilian soccer players ranging from barefoot amateurs to celebrity pros (Sun 10/9, noon). Directed by Thibaut de Longeville and Lisa Leone, the French-American coproduction Just for Kicks (67 min.) includes Nike gear in a boosterish report on the $26 billion sneaker industry and its hip-hop enablers. "The sneaker is to hip-hop what the crucifix is to Christians," claims French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz (Fri 10/7, 6 PM).

Infamy (89 min.) perceptively profiles seven graffiti artists in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Director-cinematographer Doug Pray (Scratch, Hype!) lets his reflective subjects rationalize their illegal artwork (Sat 10/8, 10 PM). Mike Mills, whose coming-of-age drama Thumbsucker just opened commercially, proves less insightful in Not How, What or Why but Yes (53 min.), asking 13 people what they'd do given only three months to live (watching cartoons and assassinating politicians both make the grade). Also on the program is Mills's The Architecture of Reassurance (1999, 22 min.), in which porcelain figurines tell an inquisitive girl that the suburbs of Valencia, California, are not for her (Fri 10/7, 2 PM).

Intriguing narrative sketches with Stellan Skarsgard, John C. Reilly, Miranda July, and Mike White are featured in the first of two "Resfest Shorts" programs (Fri 10/7, 8 PM); the second includes the four-minute Duct Tape and Cover, for which School of the Art Institute student Yong-Jin "Gene" Park repurposes 50s cold-war films for modern homeland security tips (Sat 10/8, 4 PM). "By Design" showcases computer graphics, and the best works exploit the technology for political purposes: J.J. Walker uses audio recorded by air traffic controllers on 9/11 for his unsettling UA 93: Newark to Nowhere, and Rob Chiu creates a Fallujah-like street scene in his harrowing Black Day to Freedom (Sat 10/8, 6 PM). --Bill Stamets